 Thank you all for coming, it's nice to be in Sweden. All of us, and I'm assuming this audience is an audience of, if you will, classical liberal to kind of bring the biggest umbrella I can think of on these point of views. All of us in the Liberty movement, if you will, in the free market movement, face a real quandary, I think a real mystery, if you will. Our ideas are true. They work. Economic theory is on our side, history is on our side, reality is on our side, and and yet we're losing, and we are losing. There's no question we are losing. The West, we can talk about Asia and the Q&A if you want, but the West is steadily systematically drifting away from the ideas of economic freedom and economic liberty. That is true in the United States of America, and it has been true for 100 years in America, and it is true in Europe. You get periods in which things get better, like the Thatcher period and the Reagan period, but then very quickly things are reversed, and we return back to the steady systematic trend towards greater and greater state involvement, and indeed even during the Reagan era in the United States, which many people consider this great renaissance of free markets, government size tripled approximately, regulations increased. Yes, Ronald Reagan cut taxes, and I'm okay with that, but of course, George Bush, as soon as he came into office, reversed that, so it didn't last for very long. So we have to ask ourselves why? Why is it that in spite of the overwhelming evidence that free markets produce wealth, that free markets benefit poor people, that free markets generate a high standard of living? We are losing. Government grows, regulations increase, and this proof is not some, or the evidence is not abstract, and it's not difficult. All you have to have is a pair of eyes, a little bit of knowledge of the world and some knowledge of basic history, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time going through all this evidence because I don't have a lot of time, and I want to get to the core of what I want to say, but I'll just give you an outline, right? 300 years ago, everybody was poor in the entire world, everybody. Something happened in the 19th century, call it industrial revolution, call it free markets, call it capitalism, and suddenly, we're all pretty well off, but somehow, the left has managed to paint the 19th century as this awful, horrific period. You go to a place like Hong Kong, which 70 years ago was a fishing village with nothing there, no natural resources, nothing, and within 70 years, Hong Kong today has a GDP per capita, which is a decent measure of wealth, equal to the United States, and what do they have? All they have is protection of property rights and the rule of law, nothing else, and yet, look at the wealth they've created, as close to capitalism as we have today in the world. It works. It works everywhere. If you take the Economic Freedom Index, which a bunch of different organizations publish, and you plot it and you plot economic growth against it, the correlation is amazing. So why do countries reduce them out of economic freedom? Where do they think they're going to increase in growth? Don't they know this? And yet, you see it all over the world. I just came back from South America, where everybody is trying to be like Venezuela, as Venezuela is crashing, where people are starving, where they don't have toilet paper and soap. But that's not stopping other countries in South America trying to be like Venezuela. So what's going on here? Why do we keep doing this? And we keep doing it. We keep trying to have statism without the consequences of statism. Einstein called this, when you try to do something the same thing over and over again, expect different results, insanity. So are we just insane? Is this what's going on? What is it about free markets? What is it about capitalism that we hate so much that in spite of all the evidence of its virtue, in spite of all the evidence of its success, we turn our backs on it? We resent it so much that no matter what crisis happens, every single economic crisis is always blamed on what? On capitalism. Now, in particular, we hate the capitalists, right? Bankers, Wall Street, but every financial crisis. And again, if you wanted to know my views on the 2008 financial crisis, I'd be happy to answer the Q&A, but let me just say it wasn't capitalism. And I don't think any economist in 10 years will believe it's capitalism. It takes them a while to really run the numbers before they believe it, but it's quite obvious that this was a crisis of statism on a massive scale. This was a crisis of government regulation, government intervention. Yet we blame it on capitalism. And we load up new regulations and new controls as a consequence. And we even have great economists who explained why capitalism works. So it's not just these factual things, but we have a theory, right? We got Mises and Hayek and Milton Friedman and lots of economists who explained how these things actually work and why they're successful and why statism doesn't work. And those ideas have not been refuted. Indeed, I find that when the left makes its arguments, they have to invent new bizarre theories of economics as Piketty did in his latest book in order to justify their reasons to grow the state. So what's going on? What is it about capitalism? We hate so much because we do hate it. As a culture, as a society in the West, we resent free markets. It's, you know, intuitive. What are free markets about? What is the essential characteristic of a marketplace? Why do people participate in markets? Why do Steve Jobs build an iPhone? What does he do this for? A profit, make money, right? Does it to make money? This is about Steve Jobs making more money. Apple making more money because the profit margin in these things is what? Like 60%. Does Steve Jobs care about me? If he cared about me, he'd sell it for half price and still make a little bit of money. Steve Jobs cares about Steve Jobs. Now it's not only about money. What else? Because you guys don't go to work every day only for the money. What else do you do it for? Yeah, it's pioneering. It's exciting. It's fun, right? You go for it for the challenge. So Steve Jobs loved to create beautiful things, beautiful things he thought of. He wanted to project his, you know, values onto the world. But fundamentally what is this about? This is about Steve Jobs and business is about businessmen. Businessmen are in business for themselves. They're in it to make money. They're in it for their own fun, for their own pleasure, for their own entertainment, for, you know, for their own challenge, for their own pioneering vision. Business is a self-interested activity. But of course when I went and bought my first iPhone, it was 2008 and the US economy was spiraling out of control and I bought my iPhone because I wanted to help stimulate the US economy because I know that that's why you guys go shopping because you care about your fellow man and you want to make sure they have a job and we've been taught that consumption drives the economy. So you guys consume not because you really want to, but because you want to help the economy, right? You want to help mankind. No, why do you consume? You consume because you believe it's in your self-interest because it's fun because it'll make you more productive, because it'll make you cool, because you'll look good, whatever the reason is, it's about you. So markets are places in which people meet in pursuit of what? Yeah, their own self-interest, their own happiness, if you will. Markets about self-interest. Markets about people being selfish. It's not about maximizing social utility. Nobody goes shopping in the mall to maximize social utility. It's not about helping your fellow man. Yeah, Steve Jobs by building the iPhone helped his fellow man, but that wasn't what motivated him. It didn't motivate Edison to invent the light bulb. What motivated him was the challenge. His challenge. What motivated him was profit. He made a lot of money off of G, now he lost it ultimately to Tesla. So capitalism fundamentally is about self-interest. And this is not new because if you read Adam Smith, right, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith tells us, right, the butcher doesn't go to work to make your life better. That's not the purpose. He's there to make a living for himself. It's not his benevolence that generates the meat at the grocery store. It's the profit motive. It's him seeking to better himself. So capitalism is about self-interest. And yet, what have we been taught about self-interest since we were this big? It's not good. It's not good morally. It's not good ethically. It's even worse than not good. Right? It's evil. It's bad. Right? What's the ideal in morality that really we've been taught for 2000 years by both religious and secular moral teachers? What do we mean taught that is the good means? Yeah, altruism. What does altruism mean? Yeah, self-sacrifice, being self-less. Right? To the extent that you think about yourself in acting to that extent, that action is not moral. Pure goodness means not thinking of self, doing it for others purely for the sake of doing it for others. That's what we were taught. Brought up in a good Jewish household and my mother taught me, think of yourself last. Think of others first. Now she didn't mean it. We never mean these things. Morality in the world we live in is not meant to be practiced. It's got a purpose and the purpose is, we'll get to the purpose in a minute. But that's what we're taught. We're taught to be selfless. We're taught to sacrifice. We're taught that the moral ideal is Mother Teresa. No mother wants her child to be a Mother Teresa. But that is the ideal. That is noble. We built statues for Mother Teresa. We might even name streets after her. So let's take an example, right? Because business is not about that. Let's take a businessman, Bill Gates. He's Bill Gates. Bill Gates builds Microsoft. He makes for himself 70 billion dollars. Good guy, bad guy, from a moral perspective. Put aside your economist hat. From a moral perspective, good guy, bad guy, we don't really have an opinion. He made 70 billion for himself. What opinion would conventional morality have of Bill Gates? At best, neutral. At worst, bad guy. Now, does that change when we think about the fact that while making 70 billion dollars, indeed, the only way to make 70 billion dollars in a free market, which technology is still relatively free, is by making everybody else's lives better off. Because whose life in this room is not better off because of Microsoft? No, we're all better off because of Microsoft. We buy their product. When we buy our product, right, if I use my iPhone, I pay 300 bucks for this. How much is it worth to me? Simple economic question. How much is this worth to me if you know I paid 300 dollars for it? More than 300. Good. Usually I get 300. No, it's more, because otherwise I wouldn't have bothered, right? More. It turns out much more. So I'm better off by the sheer act of buying their iPhone. My life is better. All of us have bought Microsoft products, would be my guess. All of our lives are better off. And even if we didn't buy Microsoft products, people we know about Microsoft products with whom we trade, their lives is better off and therefore our lives is better off. Bill Gates changed the world profoundly. Bill Gates made the world a better place. He probably affected the lives of billions, billions with a B, people. And he made 70 billion dollars. Good guy, bad guy. He's still kind of neutral to negative. Even though he helped all these people, you know, so much for altruism, right? So much for altruism being interpreted as the common interpretation of altruism is benevolence towards other people, helping other people. But no, that's not what altruism is. If you help other people and help yourself at the same time, it doesn't count. Bill Gates should be, if altruism was really just about helping other people, Bill Gates in our culture should be one of the greatest moral heroes of all time, bigger than Mother Teresa. He helped more people. He changed more people's lives. I'd argue that he changed people's lives in more profound ways than Mother Teresa ever did. Yet he's not a moral hero, because indeed, he helped himself while doing it. He was being self-interested. His motivation was not to help other people. His motivation was himself. So we view it as kind of neutral to negative. When does Bill Gates become a good guy? When he leaves Microsoft? God forbid you make a profit, right? That you work for a living. And he went and starts a foundation. And he starts giving his money away. Now he's a good guy. Now we like him. Everybody has him on television. Everybody wants to talk to him. Not because he made the money. Oh no, because he's giving it away. Now I have nothing against charity. But charity is way overrated. It's not important. It doesn't change the world. How many people will Bill Gates affect through his charity? Thousands? Maybe tens of thousands? Maybe hundreds of thousands? Not billions, but yet for the charity he gets lots of moral credit. Why? Because he's not benefiting. He's not making money off of it. Now he's still not a moral hero. He's still not a saint. We haven't reached saint to the level yet, right? What would it take for Bill Gates to become a saint? Because we're not going to build roads and name them after him. We're not going to build sculptures, statues for him, right? But what would he have to do to get a sculpture, a statue? Yeah, but if he just died then that didn't count. He'd have to give it all away, move into a tent, and if he could bleed a little bit, right? Because have you ever seen a saint who died happy? The whole point of sainthood is suffering because suffering shows sacrifice. So we need a little blood to prove that he suffered. Then, wow, he gave away 70 billion dollars and he hurt as a consequence. They would name boulevards in the United States after him. Statues everywhere. But that's sick. It is truly, truly morally, ethically sick. Here's a guy who really took life seriously, who invested himself and built something that nobody else had built. Employed, hundreds of thousands of employees, changed the lives of billions of people, created something, built something. One of very few people in human history who've had that kind of impact on the world. And we treat that as eh, because he's been self-interested. So building, creating, making, everything that capitalism is, building, creating, making, right? Trading, wealth creation. We view morally as negative because of the moral code that we all believe in, because we've been taught to believe in it. That morality is about self-sacrifice. So therefore, when we give it away, then it's good. Because you have to make it in order to give it away. You have to make it in order to redistribute it. But that doesn't matter. It's the giving. The moral code we have today, the moral code of self-lessness, the moral code of self-sacrifice, is consistent with socialism, not capitalism. It's about giving. Not about creating. Socialists don't create anything. They only hand out stuff. It's about being self-less, but nobody in the marketplace is self-less. The whole point of the marketplace is the pursuit of self-interest. So we live in a world in which our moral code is consistent with a particular political agenda, socialism. And in a battle between economics and ethics, ethics will always, always, always win. In America, you see this all the time, people do not vote their pocketbook. They don't vote their economic interests. So in California recently, we had an election referendum. Everybody got to vote on whether to raise taxes on the rich. Rich being defined as $250,000 or more, which in California, a lot of people have, right? Because you can't live in California. It's a very expensive place to live. How do you think the rich voted? You know how everybody else voted, right? Sure, let's text the rich. But how did the rich vote? Overwhelmingly for it. Absolutely. Why? What happens when you live a particular life, self-interested life, your build, create all of this stuff, but you're taught that what you should live is this, you know, life of giving and sacrifice and selflessness. What happens when you live one life and you think you should be living something else? Guilt. Guilt. The whole purpose of this morality is to inflict guilt. Nobody actually expects you to be Mother Teresa, but they know that if they make you think that you should be Mother Teresa, you'll feel guilty about not being her. And as every Jewish mother or Catholic mother will tell you, guilt is an incredibly great tool to control people. So what do the politicians do in California? They say to the rich guys, you can vote against this, but if you do, those kids over there are going to go hungry, and it's going to be your fault. What are they going to do, right? In California, the specific thing they use was education. We're going to have to cut spending on education. That's always the hot button, right? That's a get you at the heart, right? Kids, they always want to use kids if you can inflict guilt on people. Babies would be good. Pictures of babies always would. If you don't do this, those babies will suffer. No, they vote for it. This happens over and over and over again. Obama, when he won, promised to raise taxes on the rich, promised to raise taxes on the rich. Eight out of 10 of the wealthiest counties in the United States voted for Obama. Rich people voted for Obama. It's a myth that rich people vote Republican and poor people vote Democratic. It's never, never been true. We live again with a mock code that necessitates moving leftwards, and that's what we do. We vote ourselves in that direction constantly. I believe that the only way to move in the other direction, I mean consistently, not with little things like Reagan or Thatcher, but consistently, to change direction requires changing morality. It requires questioning the existing mock code that we all uphold. In a sense, returning to a much older tradition of morality. A tradition of morality that didn't say the purpose of morality is to teach us to sacrifice, to teach us to be selfless, which is what, in modern times, we've accepted morality to be. But a Greek tradition of morality, and it was a Thetilian tradition of morality, that basically says, no, the purpose of morality is to teach us how to live for ourselves well. How to be happy, how to be successful, how to prosper. I was just in Greece and they told me, they told me how to say this word in Greek, but I can't. You know, we say eudaumonia, that's wrong because there's a Greek, there's the right way of saying the word. You probably know it. It's flourishing. The whole purpose of the science of morality should be to teach us as individual how to flourish, how to make the most of our lives, how to live the best life that we can live, how to be properly self-interested, properly selfish. And it was Thetilian moral code would look at a Bill Gates and say, wow, what a good life. He lived a good life, put aside the charity, who cares, in his business life. He made $70 billion. That's cool. That means he created value. That means he exercised his mind. That means he engaged with reality. That means he lived. How many people can say they really, really lived? Bill Gates can say that, I think. He would be moral, build a statue for Microsoft. Yeah, and you might mention that he did a little charity. But charity's not important. I like to tell my American audiences, right? 1776 America was a third-rate colony. Nobody really cared about it. That's why they won the war because the British didn't bother, right? They were too busy with the French and the Spanish. By 1914, the United States was the strongest military force or economic force in the world. That did not happen because of charity and community service. That happened because of business. That happened because of profit. That happened because of self-interest, people going out there working hard for themselves. And as a consequence, you got what you got. So what we need is a new moral code, a moral code built around self-interest, built around the idea that life should be lived for oneself, not for the sake of others. And this is Ayn Rand's real contribution, I think, or one of her contributions to the whole debate about liberty. Ayn Rand articulates a morality of selfishness. One of her books is the virtue of selfishness, which I think you can't buy here. Is that available in Swedish? Yeah, no? Okay, should be. She makes a case that you live once, you got to make the most of it. And that doesn't mean you treat people badly, because it's not in yourself the interest to treat people badly. What is the most important thing to do if you're truly self-interested? If you really care about yourself, if you want to make your life the best life that it can be, what is the most important value you should pursue? What makes us, in a sense, human? What makes all human values possible? What's that? Interact how with other people. How do we even know how to interact with other people? Yeah, you got to think. I mean, we're pretty pathetic as an animal. We're pretty weak, we're slow, we have no claws, we have no fangs. Everything we have, we have to figure out how to do. If you want to interact with other people, you have to communicate. Communications, you know, requires concepts, requires reason, requires the mind. But more than that, where do we get our clothes from? Anybody here have the gene for clothes making? You don't. No human being does. Somebody had to figure out how to skin an animal and turn their fur or whatever, I don't even know what it's called, never mind how to do it, into clothes. That's not trivial. Agriculture, anybody know how to do that? Right? You have to figure it out. And today, you have to figure out how to build one of these. Every, every value that human beings have created has come from the use of a mind. Reason is our most important value. And then we apply reason to interacting with other people, engaging with other people and, you know, trading with other people. And trade is wonderful, right? Because trade, who loses in a trade? Yeah, that's win-win. At least we intended to once in a while, you lose in a trade. But that's not your intention entering the trade. Sacrifice my definition is what? Yeah, you lose. Otherwise, it's not a sacrifice. You have to bleed, right? There has to be a loss. So we'd rather have an ethical system that believes in lose-win transactions than win-win transactions. So Rann encourages us to think, think, think, apply that thought to our lives, live a complete life based on those thoughts, interact with other people based on the trade principle, trading both material and spiritual goods, right? Love, if it's mutual, is a trade. It's not a sacrifice. And that's bizarre to think of love as a sacrifice. Love is the most selfish emotion you will ever feel. It's about what somebody else makes you feel about yourself. Imagine you go up to your bride-to-be and say to her, we're getting married? This is the biggest sacrifice of my life. It's ridiculous. And yet we talk about love being selfless and all this garbage. It's garbage. So, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna cut it short so we can have a conversation. My view is if we want a free market revolution, the title of the book is free market revolution, the title of the talk is the free market revolution. What we need is not a political revolution or economic revolution. If we have those independent, they won't last. What we need is a much more deeper cultural revolution, a much deeper philosophical revolution. At the core, what we need is a moral revolution. What we need is to reject the morality of altruism, the morality of selflessness, the morality of self-sacrifice, and embrace a new moral code, which is the morality of self-interest. And this is why it's so hard because it's much easier to talk about economics, much easier to talk about politics. Even for me, it's easier to talk about economics than it is to talk about morality, particularly because people's morality is tied up with their emotions in a deep sense. It's tied up often with a religion in a deep sense. It's tied up with what their mother taught them in a deep sense. And to change your culture morally, to change the moral perception of people within a culture is very, very difficult. And this is the barrier we come up against. And of course, the real barrier is we won't even talk about it. Only Ein Rand is willing to talk about it. Most of us have accepted conventional morality and are trying to, you know, I see this all the time, whether it's Hayek or whether it's others trying to take conventional morality and cram it into capitalism and make them somehow work. Even Adam Smith does this, right? Because while he says the butcher does it for his own self-interest and these other things do it for their own self-interest, he also says that self-interest is not noble. And what makes all this okay is the fact that when you add up all these self-interested actions, using the invisible hand, you get what? A better society. But the standard is society. The standard is not the individual. Indeed, self-interest is not noble. So I guess I'm here to call for more revolution. Thank you. It's time to welcome Björn Hasselgren up on the floor. Good to be here. Thank you for your speech. It's very interesting, enthusiastic and convincing for those who like it. But to start, I have some comments. I like it. It's good. I also like a free market revolution. That's good. Having said that, you speak about objectivism, what we see in rationality and trying to understand why social democracy or morality is so strong and seems to be stronger all the time. Perhaps it's obvious for many people. For example, if you look into the financial crisis or if you look into the discussion on welfare services in Sweden, we spoke about that before. You can see a tendency that in the present society where you have a big government, you have a tendency for socializing losses in private enterprise and or corporations while you have a tendency for privatizing profits. If you make a profit as a private entrepreneur, you can take it yourself. But if you make a loss, you can socialize it, leave it to the other taxpayers. I think that you don't like that. That's one of the reasons why I think on the way we would like them to be. I think that is quite important. If we would like to understand how to change things, I think to have the private entrepreneurs, the private businessmen and women taking also the losses is very important. I think that is very difficult in a society like this with a big government. I think that's an objective reason why we tend to like governments, because we don't like losses, we like profits. And perhaps that's difficulty speaking about selfishness, because isn't that really the ultimate selfishness to like profits but like to have others to take the losses? So that's perhaps a randian. No, it's not. So why isn't it? That's a good question. So to truly understand what rand means by self-interest, you know, one has to think about what's truly over the long run in a rational sense what is in our self-interest. And it's not in our self-interest to be bailed out. You don't learn from it. You don't grow from it. Failure, I mean Steve Jobs is a great example, how many times does this guy fail? Lots. And he grew from it and he became a better person and a better entrepreneur from it. So nobody benefits other than those who seek power. And again, I don't think they're being self-interested either, not in this deeper sense. I think it's a superficial sense of self-interest. It's a momentary enjoyment, but it's not when you're bailed out, take a psychological view. I mean, iron rand links happiness and flourishing to self-esteem, to the sense that I am capable, I am able, I can cope in the world. When you're bailed out, what are you being told? That you're a failure, that you need other people's help, that you can't survive by yourself. This is why I think the welfare state is so destructive. It's not destructive because it takes my money. I do okay even with the taxes I pay. It's destructive because it's giving money to people and telling them, don't worry, be happy. But they can't be happy because unless you work, unless you produce, unless you, unless you struggle a little bit, you're never going to be happy. Happiness comes from that effort. Happiness comes from the exercise of our reason in reality, in pursuit of a goal and achievement of that goal. And if goals are never set, nobody's ever happy. So it's a deeper understanding of what self-interest is than the superficial kind of economic sense in which, yeah, I got more money, therefore I'm better off. But I'm not quite convinced by that argumentation because I think many people are quite well off socializing the losses. I would be very happy to have profits from a company and not having to bear the losses. I'm not quite sure that I'm I wouldn't let less good more moralically speaking. So I'm not quite sure. I think that's quite interesting, but it's more interesting saying the development of the rules, how we interact in society in some way. And I think that it's a bit problematic in the view that you have. I have to criticize in some way. Because you are speaking about some kind of learning method. Things are learned in society. You learn from how you interact in society. And from this learning process, morality is in some way developed. But you say that it's only a specific kind of learning process or outcome of a learning process that is okay more or less according to Rand and you. And other ways of learning is not okay. And I think that is the problem. If you have a free society and a free market and a liberalized society, how can you really judge what is good and what is bad learning from a moral point of view? So we all accept the fact that some food is poison and some food is good for you. And we accept that we're a biological entity that when we consume certain things, we die. And if we consume other things, we're healthy. What I'm saying is as a mind as a spiritual entity, it's the same thing. If you consume certain things, if you act in certain ways, if you believe in certain ideas, they are destructive to what you are as a human being because we have a particular biology. And if you do other things, think, be honest, have integrity, have pride, that's good for you. And that's a scientific question. And I need to prove it. And I haven't proved it, I gave a short talk. But that needs to be proved. But the question is, is the idea right? That is, can we say about human beings, certain things are good for you and other things are bad for you, not just from a material sense, but from a spiritual sense as well? And what Rand and Aristotle, if I can go backwards, and really all Greek philosophers, believe that yes, we can say certain things spiritually are good for you and certain things are bad for you. Now in a free society, you are free to commit suicide, even if you want to do it very, very slowly. So you are free to consume spiritual products that are going to kill you spiritually. I'm not going to stop you. But I can certainly give you advice. And this is the role of the moralist, the moral philosopher. The role of the moral philosopher is to say, look, this kind of behavior, you're being an emotionalist, you're acting based on your emotion, that's not healthy, you're going to get in trouble if you do that. Reason is the way in which we achieve happiness and flourishing in human life. I can't force you to be reasonable, you know, go live your life. But this is my advice, just like the nutritionist gives you advice about the food you eat, the expert in aesthetics should be giving you advice about what ought to consume and what ought not to consume. So should the moral philosopher give you advice about how to live your life. And you don't have to accept it. That's the beauty of freedom. That's good. Speaking about charity and the whether giving is good or bad. Another thought I got was if the case is that we have learned over time, or people have learned over time, that it's rational to be giving away things, to engage in charity. If that is rational for my well-being as a human being, would that be wrong then? You say that charity is... No, I just said it's unimportant. I didn't say it was wrong. Charity is fine. I think charity is okay. If it's for the right reasons, I think if it's out of guilt, unearned guilt, then I think it's wrong. Deal with the guilt. Don't hide it by giving charity. But if you believe in a cause, I run a charitable institution. It's a non-profit. I go around, try to convince people that it's in their self-interest to hand me a check. So I believe in charity. I just, again, I don't think it's that important. In the history of mankind, charity hasn't done that much as compared to business, as compared to entrepreneurs, as compared to engineers and scientists and philosophers. And we give a huge moral credit, right? And all the emphasis is on charity, on what they do in charity. And I think it's just overstated. But then you are saying that morality or charity or a value, ethics, some kind of ethical value that you have learned over time might be rational and in the pursuit of self-interest. So there is some kind of morality that develops through interaction and learning in society. Yes, but some kind of common interest. Yeah, but this is kind of a Hayekian view of social evolution. Hayek is good. Hayek is not very good. I mean, Hayek is a genius when it comes to economics as a social thinker. I said earlier, I think he's very mediocre. I don't think he's particularly good as a social thinker. I know that, I know Hayek held in very high esteem among libertarians, but not so much among objectivists. I think this idea of social evolution of moral values or political values or social institutions is very, very dangerous because the fact is that we evolve in very, very destructive ways because sometimes the ideas that come to dominate a culture are suicidal. And I think the fact that the West has risen, declined, gone up, gone down, where we slotted one another on a regular basis suggests that maybe just leaving it to evolution is the wrong idea. And of course Hayek contradicts himself because he actually is a big advocate of advocating for a particular set of ideas that he thinks are superior to the ideas that have evolved in the culture. He's a big believer in we should dominate the libertarian or the pro-liberty should dominate the intellectual high ground and we should reeducate. So there's a contradiction there in Hayek himself, but that doesn't bother Hayek because he's okay with contradictions. I'm not. So my view is the morality as it's evolved in the last 2,000 years is wrong. I would even go further. I'd say it's evil. It's anti-human life and it results in disaster. And this is a consequence of the rejection of Greek philosophy, particularly by the Christian church and then the secularization of Christian morality by philosophers, particularly the German romantics, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and all those guys. And I think that's only led to disaster. And I think there was one period in human history, in modern human history where that was challenged, which was the Enlightenment. And that's what we need to return to. We need to return to the thinkers of the Enlightenment, just with a little bit of reinforcement. I happen to think Iron Man provides that reinforcement. And we need to be willing to challenge morality. We need to be willing to challenge Christian morality. I think Christian morality is wrong. I think it's bad for us. I think we need an alternative and I think Iron Man provides us with one. I'm nothing but bold. But then it's difficult. You won't win an annexion saying that the last 2000 years have been wrong in human kinds. But now we will do something better. Do you believe me? I'm better than all the people who have lived for 2000 years. But that's not what I'm saying. No, no, no. But it's difficult. It's a very... I said this was a very hard challenge. Another thing, Bill Gates. Perhaps my view is that the problem with Bill Gates is that we like him too much, isn't it? That he has been heroized in some way. The guy who came from nothing and that developed these fantastic products, changed the way of our lives, his business and all the money he earned. Isn't the problem really that we think he is too great? And he has become some kind of Christian symbol, more or less, a savior who cries in society. I'm not quite sure that the bad guy thing is so strong. The American public cheered when the Justice Department unjustly went after Bill Gates to try to break up Microsoft. And they would have loved to see him fall. Luckily, he didn't. But no, there's definitely a tendency among us to like these guys to come down. And even Steve Jobs, who we admire, has been admired enormously. As soon as he died, the newspapers came out with stories about, don't overdo it with Steve Jobs. He didn't give to charity. Because Apple never had a charitable wing until now. Now the new CEOs established Apple charity. As if that matters. They're changing the world, but we need a little charity arm to bribe you so you like us. Because we don't have the charisma of Steve Jobs anymore. But immediately he was being criticized for being too self-interested, for being too focused on Apple and so on. But look, my claim is not that nobody's been good in history. My claim is to the extent that they've been good. They've ignored Christian morality. So Thomas Edison didn't go and help kids in India. Thank God. He spent his time inventing the light bulb. And we're all better off for it. JD Rockefeller, Carnegie, all these people that we've learned of villains created the wealth that we all enjoy today. So good for them. They are heroes because they rejected the learned morality of their time. We are better off for it. So I think we should admire these people for the fact that they lived a full, complete whole life. Okay, thanks. Thank you. The good questions. Good questions. Good challenges. But I have to disagree with you. I'm not surprised. I've been active in Swedish national politics since 1974. And I would say that today we live in a more, much more capitalist society than we did in those days. If I sum everything together. We didn't have private school in those days. We had a modern tax rate of 85% at the most, while today it's down to maybe 75%. It's way too high. But the change has gone in the right direction. I agree with you. I would say that the turning point in modern political history was 1989, with the fall of the Berlin war. Then everybody should have realized that capitalism was superior, was victorious, as against socialism. And my problem is, why hasn't this development that I sketched here gone more rapidly? So let me say two things. I agree with you. I mean, Sweden is an example. I would add a rare example where since 1994, you have become more free, more capitalist a little bit. It won't last. It won't last. And the reason nobody learned after 1989 is there's a general principle that I believe in strongly. People don't learn from experience. They don't learn from history and they don't learn from facts. Because you didn't need the Berlin wall coming down to know what a disaster the east was. Everybody who visited then you, people were trying to, I have to tell this to young people, you know this, but they built the Berlin wall to prevent communists from rushing into capitalist countries, not the other way around. So everybody knew what was going on, yet they refused to, but I'll give you a current example that's happening right now. Over the last 30 years, Chile, Chile and South America has been an economic, people call it a miracle, right? They adopted free market policies and their economy. It went from the poorest country in South America to the richest country in South America. I mean, they've done phenomenal. They privatized their Social Security. They privatized their pension plans. They, you know, it's an amazing place. And yet, they are now undoing all the things that made them a success. They voted twice now for socialist president who has said, I'm going to undo all these things. Now they've got a neighbor, not that far away, called Venezuela. And you can see what happens. They don't even need to need to know history about what happened in communism. They can see Venezuela right now. What did they learn from it? Nothing. I was just in Ecuador and Ecuador is trying to be Venezuela. People don't learn. And my argument is they don't learn because they don't want to learn because capitalism is uncomfortable. Capitalism is hard. Capitalism requires them to challenge them at the very core of their beliefs. And this is my moral argument. My moral argument is as long as we believe in the morality of altruism, we will never adopt capitalism because we will always get the tug back towards socialism. And yes, even the socialist will adopt elements of capitalism for a while because they need it in order to survive, right? They need the wealth to redistribute, right? I mean, in Sweden, they give you a little bit of freedom so they can tax 75% so they can give it away, right? Because if you stop working, if they raise it to a high enough level where you stop working, there'll be nothing to redistribute. So the socialists know this. So they have periods in which they free up the economy a little bit so you can guys can create a little bit of wealth. And then they take it from you and redistribute it. And you see this over and over again everywhere. And everybody accepts it. Nobody cares because it's good. Redistribution is good. It helps support. I talked to the former minister of finance in Sweden. And he was asked by somebody, what his relationship to capitalism was. And he made a short explanation like this. We need to have capitalism as a mystical enemy. But we have to live by the rules and rules of capitalism in practical life. And my question is how can it be possible to deal with this dice, don't die in the future? Don't you think that it will prove impossible? I hope so. But I'm not convinced. I think people have the ability of self delusion that's quite intense. I'm Jonas Nilsson. I'm studying political science at the National Defence College here in Stockholm. I have a question regarding the US constitution being pretty much the sole constitution in the world that will promote individual rights and the rights for the freedom and the right to cross those individuals. And still that constitution has been the seed to build the biggest state that the world has ever seen. So how can we... Not on a per capita GDP basis. So it's big but it's not... Pretty much in power, military power. It's outweighs the 10 most countries that put into military. So why did this happen given how good of a constitution it is? Yeah and how do we prevent with the constitution? How do we prevent the government to outgrow its purpose? And this is the problem with the American founding, including the constitution. They... I mean, in my view, the founding fathers were geniuses and heroes and I admire them enormously. They created... And this is the problem, you know, they're the children and the likements. And the likement challenges everything that comes before in two regards. Metaphysically or epistemologically, they reject mystical revelation and they accept reason as the way in which we know. You know, the age of reason the enlightenment is called. And second, they believe in political freedom, right? So they built... The founding fathers built this magnificent political system with the magnificent constitution and declaration of independence and a whole set of writings to defend it. And they built it on quicksand and the quicksand is the moral code. They're completely conventional morality, morally. They accepted the moral code of the previous 2000 years and they built this beautiful political system that doesn't belong with that moral code. So the people didn't... You know, the morality never changed in the culture. And again, in a battle between morality and politics or economics, morality will always win. It has taken 150 years for the morality to erode this magnificent political structure that was built, but in the end, it did erode. The only way to preserve a constitution is to have the people accept the philosophy on which it's based. If the people reject the philosophy, the constitution is dead because you can't preserve a document. Anymore than you can preserve a religious document if the people stop believing. It doesn't work. So you have to have a complete, comprehensive, consistent philosophy to defend the constitution, which the founders did not have. I think we do today, but they didn't back then. So if we rewrote the constitution more consistently and educated people about its moral foundation, which is individualism, which was implicit in the constitution, but at the core of individualism is self-interest as a moral ideal, then I think it can be preserved. But it's always what Franklin said something about, you know, you have freedom if you can keep it, right? It still requires every human being to value it and to the extent that a large percentage of the population, overwhelming majority, doesn't value freedom. Freedom will die. Now, I have a question on a more individual level. Now, as members of a society which is constructed upon this moral basis, which you have described in very great detail here, how do we ourselves go forth into the world without actually acting immoral, contrary to ourselves and contrary to our fellow men? Do you have any tips about as moral beings, how can we live our fullest life without actually damaging ourselves and damaging our fellow men as we live in this electricity society? So I think I get the question. So I mean, I think morally you have to think about what's really in your self-interest long term and you have to live it. And if you really think about it, if you walk through all the steps and you really structure it, things like things that are typically associated with being selfish, lying, stealing, cheating, for example, right? We all think selfish, lie, stealing, cheat, right? Take favors from the government, bailouts, whatever, that's selfish. If you really think it through, and I know I haven't been convincing yet, but if you really think it through, none of those are good for you. None of those are good for you. None of in the long run, right? Over a lifespan, which is what you should be thinking about. She need to think about what's really in your self-interest over the long run. What will make your life the best life that can be over the span of your live another 60, 70 years? Not just tomorrow, not just satisfaction in the moment, but really what is good for you. Most people don't think that's the biggest sin in life. They emote. They have whims. So take somebody, everybody know Bernie Madoff is? Bernie Madoff was the guy who had the pyramid scheme. He stole $50 billion from his friends, right? Bernie Madoff didn't sit down one day and say, I want to live a great life. I want to be, I want to live a flourishing life. I want to live the best life that I can be. I know I'll steal my friend's money because nobody who actually went through that process of thought would ever come to that conclusion. I don't know if anybody here has lied, have you ever lied? No, I don't want to really know. Lying sucks. It's not good for you. It's a disastrous policy. It consumes way too much energy and way too much effort that the truth is so much easier and simpler ultimately, even though it's harder emotionally sometimes. Bernie Madoff wanted money. He saw a pile of money and he took it. He didn't think about it. He didn't evaluate. He didn't judge. He just emoted. He took it because he felt like it. And then he suffered the consequences and he probably wondered, why am I so miserable? Because he was. He actually says he's happy in jail today that he was before he was caught. Why? Because he couldn't look his friends in the eye. You can't have a conversation with a friend when you've lied to him constantly for weeks. Try it with your spouse sometime. It's a disastrous policy. So you have to really, I mean, I tell audiences that being selfish, and I use selfish purposefully because it's a shocking word, right? Being selfish is hard work. Hard work. It requires real thinking. It requires effort. It requires investigating. It requires introspection. What really makes me happy? What doesn't? And if you're tempted to hurt other people, if you're tempted to steal, lie or cheat, then you're not doing the work properly because it's never in your self-interest to exploit other people. And that's partially the bailout stuff. That's just exploitation. Thank you all. Thank you.